Lesson 3: How to Syndicate Your Content

Video transcript

Hey, Ezra Firestone here, from SmartMarketer.com for Shopify Ecommerce
University, and I'm back with you. It's now time to syndicate this content.

We've created it. We've optimized it. We've gotten all ready. Let's now get
it out there to our community and our fans and our subscribers to see. The
first thing we're going to do is upload that video to YouTube. We're going
to upload the video to YouTube and here's exactly how we do that.

The first thing we do is we go to youtube.com. We sign in with our Gmail
account. We should have a Gmail account and a YouTube account already. If
you don't, sign up for one. It's free and it's an amazing free service from
Google.

Click "upload." You'll click "upload," and it'll basically bring you to a
place where you can drag your video. You just drag your video in to the
uploader, and YouTube will immediately start uploading it. It will bring
you up a list of options.

You're going to add the title of your post, or the title of your video to
the title. In the description, you're going to put a link to your website.
You're going to put a link to your website as the first thing in your
description. Here's why.

Have a look back here. This is an example of a YouTube video that's already
uploaded. Look what shows up. The first thing that shows up in the
description is a link back to the website. Oftentimes on YouTube it doesn't
show the full description. It just shows the first line. We definitely want
to have the link back to our website in every one of our YouTube
descriptions. It's the very first thing.

This also gives us a link from YouTube which helps us with search engine
optimization, social signal, and it drives users and visitors who are
watching our videos on YouTube back to our website.

We've put in a link and a description. Then we put in the video highlights,
those highlights we created in the optimization section of the course. We
put those highlights right here in the YouTube description.

What happens when we put those in there is YouTube automatically links them
up. You can see it automatically hyperlinks them for us. We're going to add
any relevant tags, any keywords or tags that are relevant to the specific
video that we're uploading in the tags section.

The next thing we're going to do is going to upload our custom thumbnail.
Remember, it's fine if you don't have one. You can just take a screen shot
from your video and put some text over it. We're going to next add our
video to an appropriate playlist, whatever the appropriate play list is.

If you don't have a playlist, you might want to create one. They are very
easy to create. You can create one when you click "add to." You can just
click "add the new playlist" at the very bottom there.

You want to create playlists for the different types of content you create.
You might a behind-the-scenes playlist. You might have a product
information playlist. Definitely create playlists, because it gives people
who are viewing your YouTube videos a good way to engage with your content.

Once that's done, it's just going to upload for you. You want to copy the
YouTube URL so the URL of the YouTube video is pasted into your text
document that we've created for your post. You want to copy the imbed code.
You go to YouTube. You click "share" on the video. When you click "share,"
it'll pop up this thing that'll allow you to grab some code and imbed it on
your blog. So you want to copy that imbed code over into your text document
as well.

As I mentioned, I also use Wistia. I love Wistia, and I use Wistia because
it's a little bit prettier of a player. The player looks a little bit
better. I get a little bit better insight into what's happened with the
people who are watching my video. I can see where they dropped off. I can
tag people who've watched certain videos, and follow up with them if they
didn't finish. I can just do more robust marketing with Wistia.

It's free for your first three videos, so you can use Wistia for free for
your first three videos. It's $25 a month if you want to have up to 25
videos, and $50 month for 50 videos. It is a paid service. It's free for
the first three. If you want to use Wistia, I'll show you how to upload a
video through Wistia.

I like Wistia a lot, but again, I used YouTube forever until I learned
about Wistia. I still use YouTube on some of my websites and some of my
stores. YouTube is just fine, but if you want a little bit more flexibility
and features from a brand-name marketing perspective, Wistia is a good
player for that. You just go to Wistia. You sign up for your account,
obviously.

When you log in, you select the appropriate play list. In Wistia you have
different playlists or projects as they call them. If you don't have a
project, you can create one. Next to that project, once you select it,
you'll see something that says "project actions." You click that in the
right-hand corner, and you click "upload media." It allows you to grab a
piece of media to upload.

Once that piece of media has been uploaded, a progress bar will show up.
After you start uploading it, you can click on that actual piece of media.
In this case, it's Tactics for Strategy. It will open up that particular
video file. You can see here on the right you get to customize it.

You click "customize," and from there, you can upload your custom
thumbnail. You can set the color of the play bar, the play bar that shows
up on the video. You can do some cool customization with Wistia. They allow
you to kind of manipulate the player a little. Once you've done that, click
"save," then under video actions, click on "imbed" and "share."

Wistia gives you a couple of different ways to imbed the video. You can do
an in-line imbed, which is basically like YouTube where it's just on the
page. You can do a pop-over imbed where when they click play, it just pops
up a little light box that has your video in it. So, you can do some cool
stuff, but basically copy that imbed code that you get from Wistia, and
paste it into your text document as well, because if you're using Wistia,
that's going to be the imbed code that you use on your blog.

The next step is post it to our Shopify blog, to actually post all this
content to our blog. We're going to open up our text document that has all
of our information in it. We're going to go into the back-end of our store.
We're going to click on "blog post." We're going to click on "add new blog
post."

We're going to put in the title of our post in the middle here. In the
content section we're going to click on the little arrow in the right-hand
corner. That switches it to HTML. We're going to paste in our audio Acrobat
code. We're going to paste in our custom image. We're going to paste in our
video highlights, our PDF download link if you're using lead pages to
create an [opt-in] page. You can paste that code in there. Put in the post-
transcript.

Add your "add this code" and put in your related post. Your related post
you have to code by hand. I put a little bit what the code will look like
here. If you don't know anything about code, don't worry about it. You can
get a web designer or someone to help you. If you do know something about
code, then what you see here is ahref= and then a link to whatever to
whatever the extra post is.

Then we close that href, and we open up an image. We said image source with
whatever the image is. Then we close the link with an "a." So we open it
with an ahref, we put the image as the link to the post, and then we close
it down.

It's basically just linking to another one of our posts in this actual post
with an image. It's sort of the related-post feature that I showed you on
my blog. It's a way to hand-code that into your Shopify blog. You don't
need that, but it is easy to hand-code. If you're a little bit confused,
you can contact someone on Elance or oDesk to help you get that in there.

This is the content we're going to have in our post. Then we're going to
select an author. If you have more than one author, then you would select
that author. If you don't, you just select yourself.

Select the blog. Shopify allows you to have multiple different types of
blogs. I usually just have one on my store. You select that blog category,
and then you're going to put in any relevant tags that you have. So put
whatever relevant tags from a search-engine optimization perspective so
that people on your blog can easily find the different pieces of content.

If this content is about your product, you might put in that product name,
or if it's about aging, you might put that in. Whatever is relevant for the
post put that in the tags category.

Scroll a little bit down the page and we're going to put in the page title
now. This is not necessarily the title of the post or of the video. We want
to make it an SEO friendly title. Is there a keyword? Is there a product
keyword? Is there some kind of keyword that's relevant to this particular
piece of content that you're putting out?

If so, you want to include that in the title. Put in your SEO friendly meta-
description. This is kind of a little bit of a synopsis of what this post
is. Make sure it's under 160 characters. Then you can set a specific
publish date if you want.

If you don't want to publish this content right away, and you want to wait
a little bit for it to publish, you can set that so it publishes at a
certain time. Then you click "save," and your post is uploaded to your
blog. It'll look just like this. It'll look just like the one that I showed
you before when I showed you live. We've posted the content to our blog.

Now we're going to up-load it to Facebook. You can see this is the "Behind
the Scenes" video I was telling you about that got so much love on
Facebook. You can see 38 shares there and 56 comments. That's all
organically. I'm going to show you exactly what we do to upload that piece
of content to Facebook.

We navigate to the appropriate Facebook fan page. We select the photo/video
thing in the top of the fan page there. We choose the appropriate video
file to upload. You can see tactics or strategies on MP4 has been chosen.

We add a title for the video. We add our TinyURL link. This is our Google
URL Builder link. We went to Google URL Builder. We've put a link. We put
in the link back to our blog post because we're uploading our video to
Facebook.

We're not just posting a link to our blog on Facebook. We're actually
uploading our video into Facebook so our fans can watch a video right in
their news feed without ever having to leave their news feed. It allows
people to engage with our content inside of Facebook without asking them to
leave Facebook. It's a great way of getting engagement and people watching
your videos.

You can also put links back to your content as well. You won't get as many
people engaging with it that way, but you will get people back to your
website which is ultimately what you want -- which we'll talk about in the
advertisements in a second here.

You can see that we put the TinyURL in there which is Google URL Builder.
We also put brackets. We also put "new video" and then a couple hashtags.
That's how we do it. We put a title, a link back to our piece of content.
We put "new video" and then we put a couple hashtags that are relevant, and
we click "post."

It'll take a while for our video to upload into Facebook. A little thing
will pop up like you see down here on the right hand corner. "Your video is
processing. We'll send you a notification when it's ready."

When it is ready, you will get a little notification in Facebook that will
allow you edit your video. So you want to go ahead and edit your video. You
want to tag yourself or your brand in it. Add your title. Make sure your
description is written properly as you would like it. Select your video
thumbnail over on the right hand side. You'll be able to pick through all
different video thumbnails, and click "save."

Now your video is uploaded to Facebook for your fans to see and it's
optimized. That's how you upload and syndicate out to Facebook.

The next place we want to syndicate to is Pinterest. We want to syndicate
our content over to Pinterest. Here's how we do it.

We navigate to the appropriate Pinterest profile and we click on "our
board" so we can see our different boards. We go into the board that we
want to add one to. We click "add a pin." That will pop up a little light
box that says "Do you want to add a pin from your computer or from
Pinterest or from a website?"

We're going to put it from a website. Its' going to ask us for the URL.
It's going to ask us to put in the URL. We're going to put in the URL of
the post from our Shopify blog and click "find images." What it's going to
do is pull up a list of all the different images that it finds on that
post. It will likely find the custom image that you've created. Select the
image that you want and it's going to pop up a little box that allows you
to add some content.

We do the same thing. We fill out the description. We put the title of the
video. We put a link back to our blog post. Notice that it's not a TinyURL.
It's not a Google URL Builder link that's been shortened into a TinyURL.
It's just a link back to the blog post. Pinterest does not allow you to put
any kind of modified links in there.

We put the same thing "new video." We put our hashtags in. We select the
board that we want, and we click "pin it." That will pin our piece of
content over to Pinterest.

We pin a piece of content twice. We do this same process twice. One time
when it says "add a Pin from a website," we put the link back to our
website like you see here. This is a link back to my post. The next time we
put a link back to the YouTube video. Over here you can see these two
different boards. The one on the left is the video board, and the one on
the right is the blog post board.

One of the boards we're pinning the actual video so people can play that
video right inside of Pinterest, and the other one we're pinning a link
back to our website which gives us that social signal from Pinterest.
That's why I said create two boards on Pinterest. One for videos and one
for blog posts because we're going to pin each piece of content two times.
One time we're going to pin the YouTube URL, and we're going to pin the
actual video so it plays in Pinterest. The second time we're going to pin
the link back to our specific blog post on our Shopify store.

That's Pinterest. That's how you syndicate out to there.

Now we've got Google Plus. Google Plus is real easy. You've got your Google
Plus account. You just go to it. Navigate to the appropriate Google Plus
account, and click your little box in there right at the top of your
account that lets you share something.

You're going to put the same thing, the post title. You can notice that I'm
tagging people. I often do my marketing videos with different people so I
tag them because they are also on Google Plus, Pinterest, LinkedIn,
Twitter, and Facebook.

I put my TinyURL in there from Google Plus. Now this again is a Google URL
Builder link back to my blog post that's been shortened. I put in my
brackets and my hashtags. I click "share."

I also click the little button that says also send an email to your
circles, because if your circles are small enough, Google will send an
email to your followers. Once your circles get too big, Google will no
longer send that email for you.

I also always "plus one" my own contents, so I started off by clicking the
"plus one" button on it. I started off by clicking the "like" button on it.
I started by off by retweeting it. I kind of give it a little boost myself,
and I recommend that you do the same.

Next we have Twitter. We're going to syndicate out to Twitter. It's real
easy to syndicate to Twitter. You just navigate to your Twitter profile.
Put in the title of your video and a link back to your post with a couple
hashtags, and click "Tweet."

So that's how you syndicate out to all the different social profiles.
Again, that TinyURL is a shortened Google URL Builder URL.

Next thing we're going to do is email our subscribers and to all of our
customers. It doesn't matter how big your data base is. If your data base
is only a couple hundred people, that is totally fine. They will engage
with you.

Email your subscribers. Remember to create a Google URL Builder URL for
that email so that the link in the email is not just a link to your page or
a link to your website, but it's a link through a Google URL Builder URL.
Again, this is just another showing you that we create these Google URL
Builder URLs so that we can see in our analytics how those links are
performing.

The sad truth about this is nobody is really doing all of this. That's sad,
and it's also opportunity for you as a retailer to create really high-
quality content and optimize it and syndicate it out across all the social
profiles.

It will give you search engine optimization power because you'll have
freshness on your site. You'll be constantly updating your site with
content. You'll get social signals from all the different social profiles.
You'll be engaging your community of subscribers. It's really a great thing
to do for your business. We've created our content. We've optimized it.
We've now syndicated it.

Now I'm going to show you how to boost it with marketing, how to boost it
with a little bit of advertising power.

Just this process on its own will grow your business, will engage your
subscribers, and will increase your conversion rates. We saw a 1,000%
increase in the effectiveness of our sales after we started doing a weekly
video. That's because our customers who are on our email list were engaging
with us each week with content that wasn't directly trying to sell them
anything. They were just engaging with us and watching our videos, engaging
with our blog posts.

When we started to our sales after that, after we'd been engaging with
them, we saw a 1,000% increase in the effectiveness of our holiday sales
and our promotions because we're doing more than just trying to sell them
things.

You don't need to boost this with advertising, but I highly recommend that
you watch the next videos in this series because I'm going to teach you how
to leverage Facebook, how to leverage the most powerful advertising
platform on the planet to build your business and market your content and
build a bigger community and sell more products.

Ezra Firestone from smartmarketer.com for Shopify's Ecommerce University.
I'll catch up with you in the next video.